


Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Elvish Lembas

by orphan_account



Category: Bon Appétit Test Kitchen RPF
Genre: Fantasy elements, Gen, The Day Three Curse, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21952030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Sometimes a snack food is so weird, so complicated, or so deliberately-obscured-because-God-forbid-elves-share-any-of-their-culture-with-us-lowly-humans, that Claire just cannot replicate it. These are her outtakes.
Comments: 32
Kudos: 143
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Elvish Lembas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lemonsharks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/gifts).



> Based on lemonsharks' prompt, "Missing scenes or outtakes from an unmade/impossible episode or a fictional food." This is both an impossible episode and a fictional food- it was going to just be fictional, but then I looked up how you make lembas and it is _so vague oh my god,_ nobody could ever make it at home. Hope you enjoy!

“So before we actually get into the make, I wanted to address some of the requests we’ve been getting. Comments can be a great source of inspiration- or they can set me up for four days of painting snozzberry extract on handmade wallpaper- but there are some foods that will never show up on Gourmet Makes. It’s not that I don't want to do them, we don’t have the resources or can’t replicate the methods.

“The first category we can’t make is bewitched or cursed food. Every video you guys write in asking for Turkish delight, but the thing is, the Witch’s Turkish Delight had a spell on it that basically turned Edmund into an addict. Normal Turkish Delight isn’t going to taste like that and, like, legally, I can’t write a recipe that tells you how to addict people to your cookies.”

Andy pops into frame. “If you want to try regular Turkish Delight, don’t buy it in stores, the flavor is really mediocre. I’m doing a feature on modernized floral desserts in March, so keep your eyes peeled for an actual lokum recipe!”

“The second category is anything that is actively harmful to make, whether it’s poisonous itself or it has fatal ingredients. The test kitchen is a shared space, and even if we found some black-market mandrake dealer, we can’t expect everyone to clear out for the whole shooting schedule.”

“Fun fact," a producer says from off-camera, "New York bans the recording or broadcast of Mandrake calls, so we’d have to dub the whole episode anyway.”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Yeah, this study came out in 2017 that linked Mandrake recordings to, like, increased risk of stroke or something, and now it’s a felony.”

“Huh. You learn something new every day. Third category is foods that are literally just one ingredient, and that ingredient is completely unprocessed. We don’t have farms here, we’re just a kitchen, and nobody on staff has disclosed any druid abilities. It would be amazing to taste _pántáo_ peaches, but we just can’t grow our own fruit trees.

Plus, you know, they only come in season every three thousand years, and that short availability really limits accessibility for readers.”

A Wild Brad Appears: “BUT you guys should totally ask for an It’s Alive trip to a magic orchard, I’ve been getting really into home brewing and I could make some insane slivovitz with goblin plums.”

"So just to be clear," Claire says, "your plan for the episode is, like, show up at a fey house, ask to go inside, and eat their food.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s how the show _works,_ Claire.”

"It’s also a step-by-step guide to getting fairy-kidnapped.”

“Nah, nah, look, I did my research, okay? You don’t get kidnapped because you _eat_ the _food,_ you get kidnapped cuz you don’t give ‘em anything for it. Fey’re all about rules, right? Bargains ‘n stuff, they can’t get enough of ‘em. So all I need is some pre-established parameters.”

“That- that’s not-“

“All ya gotta do is set it up so they get something for what they’re giving, right?" says Brad. "So we Google some fey farms, shoot off a buncha emails, ‘hey, I got a series where I show people where food comes from, we’d love to visit and promote fey gastronomy,’ and bing bang boom that’s your quid pro quo taken care of.”

“Brad.”

“Can’t lock me up for eating fairy food if they already said they’d let me do it. I just gotta call up legal, make it kosher, we could shoot it next week.”

“Brad you can’t- you can’t just _call legal_ for inter-realm contract law, that’s like the narrowest field there _is-“_

“Not with that attitude you can’t.”

* * *

The kitchen is set up for the bit in every intro where Claire reads the ingredients and explains what the food she's making is. But there are no packages. There are no ingredients. There is a giant, dusty book in her hands, and nothing else. 

"Hey everyone," she says. "I'm Claire, I'm in the BA test kitchen, and today we're making gourmet lembas bread. Lembas bread? Lembas? I dunno how you say it."

"It's just lembas, right?" says a producer. "'Lembas bread' is like, the same as 'chai tea.'"

"Okay, so you might have noticed this episode is different because we don't actually have lembas here to taste. We know what it's supposed to look like- it's a bread made of corn and wrapped in leaves that keep it fresh, so I'm thinking it's probably a dough steamed in the wrapper. The only thing is, I'm not sure what properties we're actually testing here?"

A cut: the book is lying open on the table as Claire's finger stabs at a paragraph. "Like, as long as the wrapper stays on, it's supposed to last forever, but we never test shelf life, you know? Twinkies last like twenty years, but we didn't leave one of mine out to see how long it lasted.

"And then there's like. Impossible elf stuff. Look at this (bleep) line, it- it _repels evil?_ How the hell do we test for that?"

Brad, who's been rooting around in the spice cabinet, pokes his head out. "Easy, we just get Delaney to try it."

* * *

The footage might have come from one of Chris's replication episodes, because he's in the foreground and Claire is forming sad little kind-of-tamales one table behind him. She's got a giant bowl of dough, leaf wrappers, and twine, with a small pile of finished dumplings and a much larger one of unfilled wrappers. 

In the foreground, Chris is doing something alarming with a very withered fruit and a very large knife. It might be better described as a dagger.“How many dumplings have you done?” he says.

“Six.”

“And how many are left?”

Her head is buried in her corn-y hands. “Forty-two.”

“Yeesh.”

“Yup. And you’re, what, replicating a potion?”

“I think it’s a sleeping potion. Probably. Maybe.”

“Hold up," she says. "How’d you taste-test a sleeping potion?”

“Well, like, the taste doesn’t always tell you what’s in the ingredients, a lot of times it’s the fumes and the consistency that really make or break it.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

“Plus there was a spit bucket, so.” He does the knife thing to another innocent fruit.

“Are you trying to dice those?”

“I was at first. But I get way more juice if I crush them, and, like, anything to cut down on food waste, right?”

* * *

The savory lembas batch is out of the steamer. Claire opens one and checks the consistency with a fork just as Adam Rappaport walks into the test kitchen. 

"Hey, you're making lembas, right? I had some once, maybe I can give you some tips." 

“You did?”

“Yeah, there was a travel feature a few years ago, we were considering a piece on the farm where they source the grain. Didn’t pan out but I did get to try some.”

"Wow, that's great," Claire says. “So how does it, like-“

“I think the main thing is, you were steaming them in the wrapper, right?”

“Yeah, cause if the wrapper has the storage properties, it made sense that it would be cooked in-“

“I mean, it makes sense, but it’s not. Elves don’t have to make sense If they don’t feel like it. It’s, like, if a communion wafer tasted like anything, that’d be lembas, they bake it and then wrap it.”

Claire is visibly BSOD-ing. Rappaport breaks the lembas attempt apart with his fork, takes a small bite, focusing on the texture.

“And the grain you’re using, that’s, like, a homemade masa, right?”

“The one thing the recipe was sure about was that they use corn, so.”

Rappaport winces. “The book might? But the book is wrong. See, the recipe’s in Quenya, right? But that’s, like, elf Latin, and all the Elvish Studies majors learn Sindarin so they can actually talk to people. The only person who bothered translating it was this weird Oxford professor in like 1930, and he went all archaic about it. So when he says ‘corn,’ that’s the European way, where it’s just some random grain.” He takes another bite. “This is a stellar tamale, though, great work!”

He heads out. Claire pauses to re-evaluate her life choices.

“Okay, to recap, we don’t know the cooking method, we don’t have an example to taste, and we don’t even know the ingredients.”

A producer, off-camera, asks: "Do you wanna call it?"

"Yeah, I think we have to. I'd rather hand-paint another three hundred Snozzberries."

**Author's Note:**

> Chris is totally getting technique points off for crushing his Sopophorus Beans.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Elvish Lembas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22785475) by [carboncopies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carboncopies/pseuds/carboncopies), [girlwithabubblegun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlwithabubblegun/pseuds/girlwithabubblegun), [LittleRedRobinHood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedRobinHood/pseuds/LittleRedRobinHood), [luvtheheaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvtheheaven/pseuds/luvtheheaven), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins), [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




End file.
